Day of the Child

Arra Lynn Ross

Description

From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.

“What is learned? I’ll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years.” Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child’s growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, “a frieze on screen.” A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: “soother, watcher, blame-taker.” And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.

For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each’s stories, thoughts, words—“unbound / by Time & time’s delineations”—tangle together. In which apartness—“Oh indivisible divisible,” the presence of another heart beating inside the mother’s own body—is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river “breaks into many suns, the sun.” For, as the child asserts, “love is a circl[e] round / as a Ball.”

Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing “a refrain I reframed each day with new words.” 

Sujets

• Women Authors
• Themes
• Subjects
• contemporary
• América
• 21st century
• General officer
• Poetry
• General
• American
• Family

Informations

• Publié par: Milkweed Editions
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781571317506
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Day of the Child
ALSO BY A RRA L YNN R OSS
Seedlip and Sweet Apple
Day of the Child
a poem ARRA LYNN ROSS
MILKWEED EDITIONS
2021, Text by Arra Lynn Ross
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55415.
[phone]
milkweed.org
Published 2021 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art by Max Ross Kidder
21 22 23 24 25 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from our Board of Directors; the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka; the Amazon Literary Partnership; the Ballard Spahr Foundation; Copper Nickel ; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ross, Arra Lynn, 1977- author.
Title: Day of the child : a poem / Arra Lynn Ross.
Description: First Edition. Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2021. Summary: From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood -- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011928 (print) LCCN 2021011929 (ebook) ISBN 9781571315373 (paperback) ISBN 9781571317506 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3618.O84524 D39 2021 (print) LCC PS3618.O84524 (ebook) DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011928
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011929
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Day of the Child was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by McNaughton Gunn.
for Max
CONTENTS
a poem
1 The time-passing: your waterproof watch reads
3 derive not first from reason. Of Passion,
5 By the time you are five, we make metaphors
7 You move too fast to catch, erasing, from mind,
9 Go back to the boy jumping in barn hay,
11 Again, morning s make: walking, a mother deer
13 Uphold heaven-humble hurting, here-rapt
15 More magic: Morning. Choose a card, remember
17 Early light winds loose the air balloon curtains,
19 Inside me I saw your heart. Made visible
21 Seven years blink: on river, rain s ink and bow
23 made meal. Of butterflies milkweed moon.
25 My own: on the hard floor, refuses
27 and dappled bay until the river, morning gray,
29 The thread thins. December. Paris.
31 -Fine snow settles on the locusts fallen branches;
33 in plastic cups the milky liquid poured,
35 Of what is made merriment? Or, Innate
37 Until we make late February. Snow s
39 In the Living Room, the staple gun claps
41 I sing what you cannot hear in spoken words:
43 A verb-poem. In winter, he writes: Blossoms
45 September 21, 2012: you (five) over me rolled,
47 by what-you- would -become. Un-willed
49 With all my heart, nuzzling his bedhead
51 Spring blinks. Then, August s amber light. The cicada
53 and the bright blue blurred, in air, away. Ancient chant
55 The blue ball lies on the thick lawn, half-shadow,
57 If I could, again: us, on the back deck, in sun,
59 I waited for you to say you love me ,
61 I had a lot of fun, but now I m old and gray
63 (would, of him, make a single blip) and trace
65 Children, perhaps, more than any, know, their bones
67 The butterflies are hatching in Dow Gardens
69 A day of hardness in the heart, though I run
71 After dragging to Flagler s frog fountain,
73 Some redbud saplings have not, I think, made it.
75 as his father sifts for shark s teeth among shells.
77 I go far away, to write. To Belgium.